[Vision2020] All Things Southern

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Now that I have a break between concrete pourings, I can make good on my promise to respond to Michael Borden's post.  I don't know how he could think that I believe that all people from the South are "catfish eating racists," but I apologize to him and everyone if I gave that impression.  There is, however, a certain ambiguity in my use of the phrase "all things southern" that might imply that I meant all the positive qualities of the South.

My two major professors in graduate school were from Georgia and they were the very opposite of Bible thumpers and racists.  They were very sophisticated Christian gentlemen, and I would dare say that one of them, John B. Cobb, lives the teachings of Christ more fully than any human being that I know.

My daughter's final choices for graduate school were Chicago and Duke and the latter won hands down because of the way she was embraced—body, mind, and spirit—by the Duke music faculty.  She found the people at Chicago pasty-faced and dour.

Gail and I enjoy several visits to North Carolina (I got to sit in on my daughter's dissertation defense!), and even though they looked at me real funny at Bojangles when I said that I did not eat chicken, the young woman said that I could have "fixins" instead and they were real good.

I visit my Indian student friend in Houston on a regular basis, although Pasadena, south of the ship canal, is not the best neighborhood. I've enjoyed academic conferences in Texas, Florida, Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia.  Over the years I detected no differences in the quality of scholarship and critical thinking from any region of the country.

With regard to Wilson and Co., my charges of guilt by close association stand.  In an e-mail to me Steve Wilkins conceded that he misspoke about the exact date that he left the board of the neo-Confederate League of the South (LOS).  LOS's President Michael Hill attends Wilkins' church and Wilkins has not repudiated any LOS principles.  Hill once described blacks as "a compliant and deadly underclass," and one LOS leader told a reporter from the Southern Poverty Law Center that  “we need a new type of Klan.”

So as long as Wilkins and his ilk come to Moscow on Wilson's invitation, I believe that Kalvinist Kirk Kathedral is an appropriate reminder of Wilson's closest associations.  

Most informed people think of the South African apartheid Kirk when Wilson uses Kirk, and he obviously knows that.  Fewer people know that it is also Scottish for church, and that's what Wilson will tell you, but why did he nevertheless use it with its apartheid associations?  

Wilson simply loves to provoke and loves to poke other people in the eye, even though the biggest splinter is in his eye.

Nick Gier